The January 2010 issue of Pragati discusses India’s options in Afghanistan. While there are a number of options ranging from scaling up training of Afghan national security forces to actually scaling down development projects if the United States quits prematurely, editorially, we argue that it is in India’s interests to send combat-ready troops to Afghanistan. [...]
Social respectability shouldn’t get in the way of legality
Madhu Kishwar takes an eminently sensible comment by the Supreme Court—that the government ought to consider legalising prostitution—and engages in a tangential polemic on the social respectability of the oldest profession. “While there is need to decriminalise this activity and free sex workers from the terror and [...]
Only intra-party democracy will help the party bounce back
They are writing the BJP’s political obituary. And unless the BJP shows the vision, wisdom and determination that it has been lacking for the last several years, that obituary will be called for. Yet Indian politics will be adrift without a strong national counter-force to the Congress [...]
Cadres are competing to out-tough each other
“So much bungling in such a short period of time—from a regime that is seen as a deliberate, strategic player—rules out mere incompetence” this blog wrote in July this year. “While an outright leadership struggle is be unlikely, it could well be that a fratricidal war of succession is [...]
The next time one of its publications claims editorial independence, it’ll be a little less credible.
Pearson, the company that owns the Economist, Financial Times and fDi Magazine—an offshoot of the latter—can no longer credibly claim that its publications enjoy editorial independence. It just showed that the proprietors of the company can overrule the decisions of [...]
People are.
From a liberal nationalist perspective, it is impossible to agree with Jaswant Singh’s judgement that territorial integrity of pre-Partition India was worth preserving at the cost of having “Pakistans within India”. His praise for Mohammed Ali Jinnah and his criticism of Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel is based on this notion. Yet a [...]
Reinforcing the Denial in Pakistani society is setback for India
Mirror-imaging is not uncommon in popular conceptions that Indians and Pakistanis have of each other. You hear it from Indian lofty-softies when they declare that Pakistanis are “people like us”. But while Indian mirror-imaging generally stops with an innocent notion of the nature of Pakistani society, [...]
An announcement
Many of you must be wondering about recent changes at Offstumped and INI.
With this note we want to communicate together on the road ahead.
While INI continues to be focused on being a non-partisan community of individuals committed to economic freedom, realism in international relations, an open society, a culture of tolerance and good governance, [...]
Can Manmohan Singh redeem himself?
Dr Manmohan Singh has an altogether more difficult job this time. When he become prime minister in 2004, it was after Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s NDA government had begun the strategic tango with the United States, galvanised the ‘peace process’ with Pakistan and arrived at a positive bilateral relationship with China. The [...]
The controversy over a new book by Chinese intellectuals arguing for China to adopt a strong nationalist-realist posture in its foreign policy has gone largely unnoticed in India. Yet the issue is important: not merely for what the authors argue but also for the response the book has received from other thinkers and opinion makers [...]
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